"Do you want it to be a boy or a girl?" my wife asks. I know what she expects me to say. It's the same thing every first-time father would be expected to say: "Of course I want a boy!" Except I'm not so sure I do.

AP Photo / Jacquelyn MartinTrayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, is embraced by the family attorney Benjamin Crump, right, as Martin's father, Tracy Martin, prepares to speak to the media about the arrest of George Zimmerman, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, on Wednesday, April 11.

I'm thinking of the weeping woman at church who asked the men to encircle her grandson and pray. Of the crime stories and subsequent obituaries I read in The Times-Picayune. Thinking of Ricky Summers, of KIPP Central City Academy. His wounded body was seen but not reported till the day after a bullet entered his back. I'm thinking of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and his threatening bag of Skittles.

"I feel more confident in my ability to keep a girl safe," I say. "Black boys get shot."

Wednesday evening, 45 days after Martin was shot in Sanford, Fla., officials finally arrested his killer George Zimmerman and charged him with second-degree murder. It seemed at first that Trymaine Lee, a former Times-Picayune reporter who writes for The Huffington Post's Black Voices, was the only journalist questioning Martin's death and the shoddy investigation that followed. The more traditional media outlets were slow to pay attention. Even so, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center, 43 percent of white Americans surveyed said the press was giving Martin's death too much coverage. Only 16 percent of black people said the same.

But it's not just the media that stand accused of overdoing it. Richard Land, top policy official for the Southern Baptist Convention, a man who has described himself as "very liberal on the race issue," said this on his March 31 radio show: "Rather than holding rallies on (black on black crime), the civil rights leadership focuses on racially polarizing cases to generate media attention and to mobilize black voter turnout. This is being done to try to gin up the black vote for an African-American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election and who knows that he cannot win re-election without getting the 95 percent of blacks who voted for him in 2008 to come back out and show that they are going to vote for him again."

Thus, black people expressing outrage at Martin's demise are reduced to a rabble of tricksters, emotionally empty exploiters who don't experience tragedy as tragedy or ache at the death of an innocent, but, according to Land, "need the Trayvon Martins to continue perpetuating their central myth -- America is a racist and an evil nation."

It's a slander, the accusation that black people -- individually or collectively -- long for such tragedies. What we long for is some enduring sign that black lives matter: that they matter to black people, that they matter to white people, that they matter to the state.

But the time between Martin's death and his killer's arrest has been, to quote poet Margaret Walker, one of those "bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood."

To understand black America's response to the teenager's death, one has to move past the idea of black men as frightening and acknowledge that black men can be and, in this case, really are frightened.

That concession -- that black boys and men are full-fledged human beings who experience fear -- would also give Zimmerman's defenders a different perspective. His apologists have had no problem imagining the larger 28-year-old fearing the skinny teenager. What if they let themselves imagine that teenager fearing the older man, let themselves imagine Martin perceiving a threat and defending himself?

To defend the shooting of the un-armed Martin is to send the message that black men cannot acceptably defend ourselves, that even our bare-handed resistance will be cited as a reason we deserved to die.

Zimmerman has now been arrested and charged with murder. It's not a cause for celebration, though, because this is not, and never was, a game. Martin's death has left so many black men feeling vulnerable and exposed.

So much so that we imagine the birth of a son as possibly bringing us more fear than joy.